He Had Never
Been To The Canyon; There Was No Road.
We met nobody, saw
nothing except antelope in the distance, and he became more
melancholy and lost his way,
Driving hither and thither for
about twenty miles till we came upon an old trail which
eventually brought us to a fertile "bottom," where hay and barley
were being harvested, and five or six frame houses looked
cheerful. I had been recommended to two of these, which
professed to take in strangers, but one was full of reapers, and
in the other a child was dead. So I took the buggy on, glad to
leave the glaring, prosaic settlement behind. There was a most
curious loneliness about the journey up to that time. Except for
the huge barrier to the right, the boundless prairies were
everywhere, and it was like being at sea without a compass. The
wheels made neither sound nor indentation as we drove over the
short, dry grass, and there was no cheerful clatter of horses'
hoofs. The sky was cloudy and the air hot and still. In one
place we passed the carcass of a mule, and a number of vultures
soared up from it, to descend again immediately. Skeletons and
bones of animals were often to be seen. A range of low, grassy
hills, called the Foot Hills, rose from the plain, featureless
and monotonous, except where streams, fed by the snows of the
higher regions, had cut their way through them. Confessedly
bewildered, and more melancholy than ever, the driver turned up
one of the wildest of these entrances, and in another hour the
Foot Hills lay between us and the prairie sea, and a higher and
broken range, with pitch pines of average size, was revealed
behind them.
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